Twitter Hopes For Olympics Gold With NBCUniversal Partnership: WSJ

Twitter and NBCUniversal are expected to announce Monday a partnership that will establish the microblogging service as a sort of official narrator for the Summer Olympics in London. NBC will promote Twitter in broadcasts and with links to athlete interviews or video clips. Twitter hopes to use the Games to prove it can be a sustainable business, according to the Wall Street Journal. Twitter has more than 140 million monthly users looking for news or current trending topics. From an office in Boulder, Colorado, a modest staff will spend their days sifting millions of 140-character Tweets (1 million users per character? Interesting) from Olympic athletes, their families, fans and NBC TV personalities onto a single page on Twitter.com. Executives and investors want the six-year-old service to attract a larger audience and show it can be a serious money-maker. eMarketer Inc. estimates Twitter will generate $259.9 million from advertising this year, which pales in comparison to Facebook’s $3.15 billion in 2011. A larger audience would help Twitter justify its $8.4 billion valuation and clear a path for an IPO. NBC said no money is changing hands nor will the network share in Twitter’s ad revenue from its Games website. The partners will cross-promote each other throughout the event that starts Friday and runs through August 12th.